You’re not imagining it: Your kid’s school supplies cost more this year

Pencils are more expensive. So are notebooks, scissors, glue sticks — just about every back-to-school item that families will load into their literal or virtual carts this summer has gone up in price at a time when American families already feel crushed by rising costs.

According to one analysis of the 21 most common school supply items by the Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation, two progressive think tanks, prices are up about 7.7 percent with parents paying an average of $173.45 for their school supply haul. That’s an even bigger jump than last year. Add to that an 11 percent hike in prices for school lunch essentials — from the literal tons of blueberries needed to feed young children to apple juice — and costs balloon to nearly $4,000 a year to cover supplies and meals. 

That data was first shared exclusively with The 19th. The analysis is based on weekly retail transaction data on millions of products collected by NielsenIQ from about 50,000 retailers.

With school supply costs outpacing inflation, many families — and especially the women who do the majority of purchases in American households — are going to feel the sticker shock, said Lindsay Owens, the president and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative.

“Women in this country are rip-roaring mad about the price hikes that they’re absorbing. They’re trying to manage household finances and budgeting. They’re trying to feed their kids healthy food,” Owens said. “The work is getting harder of providing for your family.”

Here are the school supplies with the biggest spikes in price: 

• Lunch boxes are up 27 percent
• Notebooks, notebook paper, tissues and index cards are all up about 20 percent
• Scissor costs rose 14 percent
• Dry erase markers and glue sticks are up 8 percent
• Headphones, binders, crayons, colored pencils and No. 2 pencils increased between 5 and 7 percent

On the lunch side: 

• 12 ounces of blueberries are up a whopping 48 percent
• A loaf of sandwich bread is up 22 percent
• Apple juice prices have risen 20 percent
• A pound of oranges has risen 17 percent
• A box of packaged animal crackers will run you nearly 16 percent more 
• A package of chocolate chip cookies is up 14 percent

Driving up some of these costs are tariffs and the war on Iran. 

Take blueberries, which American families have increasingly been eating more of every year, particularly those with berry-aged children who pop them like M&Ms. About half of the berries Americans eat are imported, many from Peru, which is now increasingly selling its berries to China instead of the United States because of tariff increases. 

The other half of America’s blueberries are grown domestically, a good portion of them in Maine, the top producer of wild berries in the country. But tariffs on steel and aluminum have made it more costly to purchase the equipment needed to harvest the crops. 

“Our consumers, our manufacturers, our blueberry growers, and more will all continue to pay the price,” Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican from Maine, wrote to the Department of Commerce in December. 

Similarly, many school supplies are produced overseas, like pencils and crayons, which are predominantly imported from Brazil, China, Mexico and India. The war in Iran, which has raised fuel and shipping costs, has directly impacted imports and those price increases are being passed on to consumers. Though inflation is showing signs of cooling, oil prices hit a six-week high in late July.

“Gas prices filter through to everything, but especially food,” Owens said. “The cost of transporting food goes up. The cost of farming goes up because the cost of diesel is up. The cost of plastic goes up, so the packaging around pencils or deli ham, that gets more expensive. All of that is going to filter through to higher food prices and higher prices for consumer goods like back-to-school staples.”

The problem is parents don’t have a lot of wiggle room on the matter, said Julie Margetta Morgan, the president of the Century Foundation. Kids need the supplies to be successful during the year, and parents, whether they’re low- or high-income, want to ensure their kids can thrive. 

About half of parents expect to take on debt to cover back-to-school shopping this year, up from 34 percent in 2024, according to a survey of parents with kids under 18 conducted this summer by Intuit Credit Karma. One in five parents say they also feel pressure to keep up with what other parents are buying their kids, a June NerdWallet survey found.

“There’s a really strong actual cost — but also emotional cost — to having to make really impossible choices about caring for yourself and caring for your family in order to bear the costs of tariffs and of a war that seems impossible to explain why we’re involved in it,” Morgan said. “It is weighing particularly heavily on mothers.” 

It’s around this time every year that Victoria Albano starts to cut back on any expenses for herself to make sure she can cover all the back-to-school items for her 6-year-old daughter, who is entering first grade this year. A July trip to Target to get everything on her list — among the items, two packs of wired headphones, Band-Aids, eight folders and four composition notebooks — cost about $230.

Albano, her husband and her daughter moved to Duluth, Georgia, three years ago because housing costs squeezed them out of New Jersey. They swapped their $2,500-a-month, two-bedroom apartment there for a $2,000-a-month, three-bedroom home in Georgia. But even with the savings, utility and gas prices remain high, Albano said. School supplies are another stressor. 

Recently, she said, “I was up all night trying to figure out what to buy and what not to buy.”

“I’m not struggling, but I’m not where I want to be,” Albano said.  

When Albano, a full-time content creator, posts her school supply hauls on social media, a deluge of messages come in from moms desperately asking Albano to donate items to their kids.

Many families cite living under that financial stress, said Ailen Arreaza, the executive director of ParentsTogether, a national nonprofit that works to engage parents politically. In the organization’s surveys, about 70 percent of parents cite experiencing financial strain, with little relief in sight.

It’s all further complicated by the loss of government benefits over the past year. More than 4 million Americans, including 1.5 million children, have lost their benefits through SNAP, the food assistance program that helps low-income people buy groceries. That makes family budgets even tighter going into the new school year.

“It feels like we are a little bit at a breaking point,” Arreaza said. “The concern and the situation just feels untenable right now.”

To get by, parents are searching their local back-to-school fairs for supplies, or seeking out backpack giveaways and school supply distributions. Some families are working more over the summer to cover increased costs. 

By the time November’s midterm elections roll around, some of this pressure is likely to be on parents’ minds in an election that will no doubt center affordability. Both parties face uncertainty heading into the midterms.

Right now, Arreaza said, “parents are so busy and focused on their day-to-day and November feels far away and the election can feel far away for parents, but the reality of what is happening everyday feels very real for families.” 

Even if folks aren’t thinking about the election, she said, “they’re thinking about the system that is making it harder for them and they’re noticing the differences.”